by Utley, Todd
“Hey Buddy let me help you there,” he said.
Bobby was a little embarrassed but was glad his friend was there to catch him.
He and Matt were really close and always helped each other out. One year they had gone to summer camp together. It was a camp that specialized in canoe trips to remote places of Michigan. It was in the spring right after school and the weather turned quite cold in the middle of the trip. Matt got very ill after their group capsized their canoe in the cold water. Bobby made it back into the boat first with two other boys then quickly went to Matt’s rescue.
Matt wasn’t a very strong swimmer back then and Bobby knew it, so he got to him just a fast as he could, helping him into the canoe. Matt was up all night sick with a fever and a bad earache so Bobby stayed up with him talking to him and getting him whatever he needed. Since then they had been very close, just as close as any brothers could ever be. Both boys had older sisters but no brothers so it was even more natural for them to be like brothers.
As soon as Bobby got back into bed the two boys started talking about all the things they would do when Bobby got home, they talked for almost two hours about all the things they did together while growing up.
“I know you would probably like to forget it,” said Bobby, “But what exactly did you see when I got hit?”
Matt swallowed uncomfortably and paused for a second to think.
“Well it happened so fast, I saw that it was going to happen but it was too late. I saw Butch chasing that cat just as you went up for the ball. Then I saw Stacey’s car and it looked like he was about to swerve left to miss butch until he saw you and then he swerved right instead. He hit the brakes really hard but it was still not enough to avoid the accident.”
Bobby could hear the quiver in Matt’s voice, he knew he was getting choked up so he did his best impression of Stacey.
“Stay out the street Nancy!” That brought a little grin across Matt’s freckled face. He was a good-looking kid that took allot after his Mother, he had reddish brown hair and green eyes and looked ornery as could be but he really wasn’t, he was actually very polite and very quiet until he got to know you.
Matt came back with, “You won’t hear Stacey say that ever again!” And they laughed about it again only to avoid being serious. Bobby figured they could talk about it later, it was still too soon for Matt. How gruesome it must have been seeing his best friend getting killed by a car.
Bobby felt like he had cheated death and now he knew how those other people felt that he saw on TV. There were quite a few stories on the evening news about both children and adults that had gone through Restoration and he wondered what it must be like, now he knew first hand. They went on visiting for about an hour. After that Matt and his Mother said their goodbye’s and left Bobby to rest.
Across town Dodge and his Father were just leaving LifeTech. On the way out they saw a man in the waiting room with no legs and missing one hand, he also had a large scar on his right cheek. Alan noticed that the man was not much younger than himself and he had a green shirt on with an Army Strong logo. Alan stopped to speak with him.
“Excuse me Sir,” he said, “Are you a veteran?”
“Yes I am, and I have the scars to prove it.”
They talked for a few minutes about their service to their country and they discovered they had been at some of the same bases for training but at different times.
The man explained to Alan and Dodge that he had received a voucher from the military for his service and his sacrifice for his country which allowed him an additional clone, one to use now to restore his body to full health, and another for later use to avoid dying of old age. It brought tears to Alan’s eyes which he quickly choked back as he thanked the man for his service and wished him luck with the new lease on life that he was about to receive.
As Alan and his son walked to the car Alan turned to Dodge.
“You know Son, I was wrong about this whole thing, it really is a gift from God, that Veteran deserves to receive it more than anyone I have ever met.” Dodge agreed as they got into the car and headed to the hospital to see Bobby.
When they arrived, Bobby was just waking up from the nap he took after Matt and his Mother left. The nurse would be arriving soon to bring his third, and hopefully, final plate of pink goop. He figured the sooner the better. In the morning he could have some real breakfast and go to therapy for a third session.
Dodge and Grandpa had arrived at the hospital just in time to meet up with Linsey and Sarah, Bobby’s older sister. Sarah was almost eighteen and was the typical teenage girl with all the typical emotions. She was an absolute mess ever since she had heard about the accident.
Even though she and Bobby suffered from a near terminal case of sibling rivalry, they still loved each other deep down. When she got the news that her little brother had been hit by a car and had life threatening injuries she passed out in the office of the gymnastics training camp where she was at for two weeks of intense training. The on duty nurse had to treat her for shock and reassure her that Bobby was going to pull through.
Her mother had not told the staff there that Bobby had actually died because she knew that it would be too much for Sarah and that just saying he was in serious condition would be bad enough.
They managed to get Sarah on the next flight home in time to see Bobby by the following evening. They told Sarah the whole story in the car on the way home from the airport and Sarah began sobbing uncontrollably when she heard from her Mother that Bobby had actually died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Sarah didn’t know anyone personally that had been restored and so she believed that it didn’t really work as advertised. Her mother reassured her that it did in fact work perfectly and Bobby was still just as much Bobby as he ever was.
“Just wait until you see him you won’t believe it! It really is Bobby,” said Linsey.
She poked Sarah, “So, you love him after all?”
“Oh Mom! Stop it, of course I do!” And that started another round of sobbing mixed with stuttered laughter that made Linsey smile.
When they got to the hospital lobby, Sarah saw her Grandfather, he was standing just inside the door with her Father. She ran into her Grandfather’s arms and began sobbing into his shoulder. She told him she was so happy that he decided to be restored. They all spent several minutes getting their composure again before going up to see Bobby.
Linsey told Sarah on the ride back about Grandpa’s decision to go through Restoration. She was so happy that her Gramps was going to be around to help her Daddy give her away at her wedding some day. She told him about that as they stood there in the Lobby. The thought of it made Alan a bit emotional which he quickly played off.
“Well, we shouldn’t just stand her slobbering all over each other,” he said, “Let’s go see your little brother young lady.”
When they arrived at the room, they met the nurse coming out that had just dropped off Bobby’s dinner tray, a nice big plate of pink goop.
“Well, all right, I figured it was about time for more visitors. Go right in, he’s doing just fine.” With a big smile she turned and sped off to the next room. Staff was much happier in hospitals these days, death was pretty much a thing of the past and it was certainly good for moral.
They all tried to stick their heads in at the same time with a simultaneous “Hi” and big smiles. Bobby was really glad to see all of them but especially Sarah.
“Hey Sis! How’s it goin?”
Sarah tried to be strong but she just burst into tears and ran to his side where she smothered him with kisses and told him how much she loved him.
“Jeeze! Sis, Come on! I’m okay and I feel great, I’ll be outta here in no time, and look no more foot fungus.” He stuck his foot out and got it as close to her face as possible.
“You are a fungus! Get that stinky foot out of my face,” she said.
Everyone laughed at their antics. They all visited for almost two hours. Th
ey talked about everything that had happened and how Grandpa was going to be twenty years younger looking and completely healthy in just a few weeks. Everyone agreed that Sarah and Bobby were certainly still the same duo. Bobby talked Gramps into trying a small bite of the pink stuff and the awful face he made was hilarious.
“Whoa, that is awful,” he said, “Maybe I should reconsider!” They all cracked up over the face he made and continued to talk until Bobby dosed off.
It was the right time to slip out and so they all agreed to come back in the morning to see how he was doing with his real breakfast. As everyone got up to leave his Mother placed a quick kiss on Bobby’s forehead and whispered that she loved him in his ear.
Dodge Kerrington was a great Scientist turned Electronics Engineer. He had attended MIT and had successfully graduated in the middle of his class. That doesn’t sound too impressive until you consider that while getting that degree he was in his mid twenties, had a wife and two children, two mortgages, and a full time job, then it takes on a whole new meaning. He started out wanting to be a Chemistry major but ended up switching it to an Electronics Engineering Major and so he spent six years in College to reach his goal.
Linsey knew a lot of career Moms and realized from her short time in that mode that it was rough on a family and it made her appreciate her situation even more. She had worked at two different jobs while Dodge finished his education and decided during that time that her desire was to be a full time Mother and Homemaker. Dodge went through several employers after graduation before he finally landed the position that he really wanted at Embedded Systems Specialist. It was a rather small company when he hired on but it grew rapidly due to their timely involvement with Integrated Biotech.
ESS acquired a long term contract to provide all of Biotech’s Engineering Support for LifeTech, a company they bought out. LifeTech was the company that had developed the technology responsible for saving his son’s life. They were also the original government contractors that successfully created the first clone with enough documented memory transfer to prove the technology was feasible. That first successful clone was the man that appeared on the Harry Letterman show as a guest all those years later.
After ninety-six attempts the government had finally succeeded in producing this one man with half way decent results. All the prior clones were euthanized after complete failure to load. In the beginning they conducted brain transplants to make the clones complete. It worked but they lost all of them to infections or to scar tissue that
formed over a period of months. The scar tissue resulted in a condition similar to Alzheimer's.
After the first successful clone they released every stitch of their documentation to the private sector under heavy security procedures in order to privatize and hopefully perfect the process. That is how ESS got involved, they threw their hat in the ring and in the end they succeeded where others had failed.
Not many people knew about the deal between ESS and LifeTech. All parties had kept the whole thing very tightly guarded to protect their trade secrets and the high-tech systems that enabled their one of kind system to work.
Others had tried and failed and only produced zombies instead of clones which resulted in huge lawsuits filed by the families of the victims. The companies folded due to the financial disasters that it created for each of them. A short time later LifeTech secretly approached Integrated Biotech offering them a huge buyout which they immediately accepted to avoid a similar fate. When the acquisition was complete, they used their newly injected capital to buy up the remnants of all the prior cloning companies that had popped up and failed.
Under the veil of the new shell corporation they had created they brought all the technology together from the various failed companies and brought all the best minds together into one group. They unloaded the dead weight of lower level tech people plus anyone who even remotely resembled a security risk. As soon as they got it down to a small core of all the best brains they brought everyone in for a briefing and demanded that everyone sign off on the tightest, most comprehensive, non compete non disclosure agreement any of them had ever seen.
It guaranteed each employee receiving one hundred million dollars upon retirement should they make it without violating the agreement. Anyone who did violate the agreement would be fired, dissociated, and destroyed in the industry to the point that they could never work again in that field, period.
These guys were serious about keeping all of this under wraps and would do just about anything to protect it. Dodge was one of the few to know of the deal because he was just high enough in the pecking order to be brought in on the briefing. He too had signed off on the same stringent agreement through ESS which was contracted to Biotech, which was the shell owned by LifeTech.
The LifeTech higher ups viewed this arrangement as a double layer of protection and they had gone to great lengths to make sure they were covered from every angle. Dodge was sworn to secrecy and dared not to tell anyone, not even Linsey. He had never kept anything from her before but he knew the financial well being of his children and their children and so on could very well hinge on the very large bonus that he would receive upon retirement if all went well.
He had to keep the trade secrets and the knowledge of the bonus to himself. While his salary was very good, it was still nothing compared to the huge bonus upon retirement from ESS. He could qualify as early as age fifty and he only had five years to go. He simply couldn’t take the risk of it getting out somehow through Linsey to one of her friends or even a family member.
Linsey didn’t know about Dodge’s real job or that he had signed away the rights to their phone and internet privacy as part of the deal. He had no way of knowing when they were being monitored and when they weren’t. If he were to tell Linsey and she slipped with even the most subtle of comments to a friend or relative they could lose everything.
Dodge knew the LifeTech system was solid because he had been a key player in developing it for many years. Linsey and the rest of the family thought that he was working on a computer programming console for the Medic-Star system that the government was using for healthcare data entry at hospitals. He was involved in that project prior only as a consultant but he knew enough about it to make it believable when friends and family got interested in what he was doing at work. If they got too nosey, he would just say that he couldn’t discuss the details because it was proprietary and he could be fired for telling too much. It was a little disappointing that he couldn’t tell anyone how these things actually worked. He was proud of his accomplishments but he couldn’t tell even his closest friends and family about it.
The next morning Bobby woke up before dawn. His stomach woke him again today but this time he actually had something to look forward to, within the hour he would be feasting on anything he wanted from the menu.
He had already made up his mind. He was getting the pancakes with extra butter, maple syrup and the sausage links and bacon on the side. He would wash it all down with some OJ and a cup of coffee. While he was waiting, he decided to watch a little TV so he turned it on and began watching some of the morning shows.
Weekday morning TV was definitely a new experience and he wasn’t too impressed with the lineup. Just then there was a light knock on his partially open door. A man slowly poked his head in.
“Hello there, mind if I come in?”
“Not at all, come on in,” said Bobby.
It was another patient from across the hall. He was a small but good looking young man with an athletic build, short cut dark hair and a good tan.
“Sorry to bother you but I couldn’t help noticing that your TV is working, mine isn’t and I was wondering how you got yours to work. I’m not too good with electronic things, never have been, oh sorry I’m Ben, Ben Hartford,” he said as he extended his hand to Bobby.
Bobby shook his hand.
“Nice to meet you Ben, I’m Bobby Kerrington.”
“Nice to meet you too Bobby.”
> “To answer your question, I just turned mine on and it’s working fine,” said Bobby. “But it could be that you accidentally bumped one of the buttons on the remote. Like for instance if you press the input button by mistake it switches the TV to auxiliary input and you just get static, just press it again and it will go back to the programs.”
“Hey, thanks a lot, I’ll try that when I go back. So what are you in for? Oil change? Alignment?”
Bobby chuckled. “You must work on cars huh?”
“Yes I do, in fact that’s how I ended up in here, one fell on me. I wound up losing one of my legs and my left hand. I used my one free Restoration to get my health back. It’s hard to be a mechanic with only one hand, and I don’t know any other way to make a living. Hey you’re so young what happened? That is if you don’t mind me asking.”
“No it’s fine. You had one land on you and I got t-boned by one.”
“No kiddin? Well I guess we have something in common we both got hit by cars and we’re still here.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true, they were just going in different directions!”
Ben laughed out loud.
“Hey you’re really funny! So, how do you like the pink stuff?”
Bobby grimaced.
“Yuck, yuck, and yuck is all I have to say about that stuff. I can’t wait until the nurse gets here today. I get to eat some real food.”
“Oh man, you’re gonna love it. That first real meal was great. I had a steak and a baked potato, what are you goin for?”
“The choice was easy for me,” Bobby said, “I’m going for a big stack of pancakes.”
“All right, good choice, you can’t go wrong with pancakes! So did you have any thoughts about how lucky you are to be alive? You know like what you might do differently?”
